It’s the first week of May, which means the Spring semester is kaput.  I am always glad when I come to the end of the semester, even though it means saying goodbye to my students.  After 16 weeks, I am ready for a new challenge and ready to see new faces.

I will be teaching again in Scotland this summer and we are reading four books of memoir and nonfiction:  Helen Ochyra’s Scotland Beyond the Bagpipes, Madeleine Bunting’s Love of Country, Deborah Orr’s Motherwell, a Girlhood, and Jackie Kay’s Red Dust Road, which is a perennial favorite of mine.  I debated about teaching Kathleen Jamie’s Findings again, which is really wonderful book; and I’ve taught it all past times I’ve been to Scotland, and I think the students like it. But I thought 5 books would be too much for 7 weeks, and I wanted to have them read some new stuff—which is to say, I wanted to read new stuff too!  So we will see how the readings go, and who knows, I might slip a Jamie essay in at some point.

Scotland has become like a second home for me—I feel so much myself there.  I wish that I could write a book of Scotland poems, but it surprisingly doesn’t inspire poetry in me (or it hasn’t yet).  Is it because I mostly stay in the city, and I don’t find cities that poetic?  Maybe. But Edinburgh is so intriguing, what with the Old Town and the New Town, and all the people constantly in transit—you see them walking along the streets, towing their suitcases—as well as the locals, who appear weary, loaded down with grocery bags and bookbags and bouquets of flowers or bike wheels.  There are lots of things to catch the eye, for certain.  But I think I might feel more like writing poetry if I could have blocks of time in nature to write.  Instead of painting in plein air, I could poem in plein air—and that might be the inspiration I need.  I need to find a space in the greenery and see what happens.  I need to find some Heilan coos!  (Just not be downwind of them!) Mostly I just need time, and of course there will be a lot going on this summer.  (But there’s always a lot going on.)

Sometimes I daydream about finding a cottage somewhere in the Highlands that could be my home away from home, maybe a croft that would be big enough for me to be able to hunker down for a month or so at a time, so I could write and be.  I think I would love that—in the mornings I could go on a ramble, and then I could come home and write and eat lunch and take a little snooze in the afternoon and write some more.  That is the dream.  Unfortunately that is not financially feasible. (I also looked into finding a little cottage in Young Harris, GA, but alas, that didn’t work out either—apparently two-room log cabins are not a thing.)

I wonder what the allure of having a little writing house is? I wonder if it’s the idea that you’re not in your everyday milieu, and that somehow being alone in a cottage means that good writing would come because you’ve eschewed the outside world.  Or is that just a myth?  I mean, don’t you take your baggage with you no matter where you go? And if you’re struggling to write at your “real” home, doesn’t that suggest that you’d struggle anywhere? And yet, I’d like to be blessed with the opportunity to find out that reality for myself!

My financial manager asked me what did I envision for myself—that if money were no object, what would I want?  And I thought about it and then declared my desire for a little writing cottage.  And she said, “Oh, I’m hearing early retirement!”  Sadly, I don’t believe early retirement is on my schedule either.  This makes me think about a person on our faculty who is retiring after this semester.  She has been on the faculty since 1981—she’s given 45 years to this school.  And while I would not want to do the same (45 years in the same place???), I kind of worry that that’s my future.  I feel like I’ll work until I’m dead.

And that would be fine—if I were doing actual book writing and not the penny-ante shit that makes up the bulk of my life.  Don’t get me wrong, I am beyond grateful to have a job.  But I do think it’s the dream of every writer to hole up and focus only on writing.  Of course, most writers have day jobs these days, and that’s nothing new.  Think Wallace Stevens selling insurance of Wm. Carlos Wms. being a doctor.  We can’t all be Steven Kings or Barbara Kingsolvers, who actually make a living at writing.

Of course, I also wonder if I really have the temperament to be a dedicated writer who deserves a writing cottage.  I think of poets like Ted Kooser, who gets up at 4 a.m. every morning, writes for 4 hours, then eats breakfast, and he’s already put in half a day.  (And then, like Stevens, he worked in insurance in his younger life.)  I am comatose at 4 a.m. Hell, I’m barely awake when I roll out of bed at 6. My point is if I had the writing cottage, could I genuinely say that I would have the writing stamina to maintain a consistent practice?  I wonder.

I’ve tried writing every day—it’s what I tell my students to do—but I’m not very good at it.  I’ve said it before and I’m sure I’ll say it again, but the only way to build a writing practice is to write every day—and not wait for “the muse” to strike haphazardly, but to actively go out and court that bitch and make her show up for you.

I do think she might be more willing to show up, though, if I had a cute little cottage somewhere in the Highlands.  I could offer her some tea and cakes, and she could keep me company as I knocked out poetry book after poetry book….